Two world records successfully presented at the SPIE Photonics West

“That was one of the best SPIE Photonics Wests ever,” said Kent Rochford, CEO of SPIE, the international society for optics and photonicsExternal link. With more than 22,000 registered attendees from 85 countries across the international optics and photonics community, traditionally held at San Francisco, the largest annual photonics conference hosted from 28 January to 2 February over 1,400 exhibitors, and featured over 4,500 technical presentations.

Aim of this conference is to provide opportunities to reconnect with colleagues, while innovation, research, and insights about emerging technology were in the spotlight, presented by world-class speakers and industry experts.

Two of those speakers were our colleagues from the research group “Fiber & Waveguide Lasers” and have been award to be part of the best presenters:

Ziyao Wang has been invited to talk about nonlinear pulse compression of a high-power ultrafast thulium-doped fiber laser in a gas-filled capillary. This laser system enables the generation of sub-two cycle pulses with mJ-class pulse energy and led to a world-record average power of 132 W in the short-wave infrared region (1.3 µm – 3 µm wavelength). In her talk, she not only showed the excellent research results, but also discussed the challenges of this method. The results were so convincing and well-presented that the jury decided to honor the talk with the first price of the best student presentation award in the fiber lasers session.

Tobias Heuermann in the same session presented on the scaling of ultrafast thulium-doped fiber laser systems using coherent beam combination of large mode area fiber amplifiers. The scalability of this laser design resulted in a world record average power for short-wave infrared laser sources with pulse energies of more than 1 mJ. With these results Tobias won the third price of the best student presentation award.

Both presenters are pleased about the international success and bring a high motivation to Jena to continue working on their research topics. “The conference provided an excellent platform to communicate with experts from all over the world, and it was a great experience for me to see the impact of our research on such an international stage.” Says the PhD student Ziyao Wang about her experience in San Francisco. In any case, participation in PW represents a highlight of our researchers' careers.